Landsat 5 Decommissioned
It is with great sadless that we learnt of the passing away of an old friend today. At the grand old age of 29, Landsat 5 was put out of its misery due to lack of capability and, well, simply being too old. Younger and better models are snapping at its heels and it just can’t cope any more - with its eyesight failing and a general lack of energy, the cold solar winters, no fuel allowance, and increased welfare maintenance, enough was enough. However it was a start that burned long and bright - Landsat 8 won’t replace you, just take over your duties.
“Now in its 29th year of orbiting the planet, Landsat 5 has long outlived its original three-year design life. Developed by NASA and launched in 1984, Landsat 5 has orbited the planet over 150,000 times while transmitting over 2.5 million images of land surface conditions around the world.”
KindleFirmware Update: 3.4
Kindle updated the firmware for its keyboard (and other) ebook readers to version 3.4. Amazon have always been good with long support and incremental improvements to stability (a rare thing in the “I can top that” IT industry). Whilst this latest firmware was trucked out with barely a mention it is worth noting that there are some significant changes:
improved font for reading
parental controls (Apple please note)
support for latest Kindle ebook format
support for picture/comic books
sync of audio books
These are are hugely worthwhile, however, for me, the biggest update isn’t mentioned at all:
better PDF reading
OK, its still not perfect, but now we get the option to exactly pick the part of the page to zoom to rather than the slightly botched “left-page” and “right-page” views. What would be even better would be support for user-defined zoom levels - this would allow sizing of the PDF page for the landscape screen. I can live and hope, but credit to Amazon for genuinely improving the user experience.
Non-sense about science
Yes, The Express is at it again; that bastion of Britishness, source of high quality news stories that just might make The Sun look like evidence based journalism has decided that to sell more copy it needs to advocate alternative treatments for cancer. Sense About Science, who I’ve blogged about before, try to make sense prevail and as they say:
Lots of you got in touch when, last week, The Express carried a terrible article advocating alternative cancer treatments. Sile spoke to them. They refused to change it. Cancer Research UK wrote a letter. They refused to print it. Oncologists and other experts responded in our For The Record.
The editor responded that the science view will have a chance to put forward its side at some future point. We asked whether, if the doctor prescribed him useless medicine and gave him the wrong advice, he would be satisfied to know that some weeks later someone else would be given good advice and the right pills. No joy there. Exasperated that they refused to edit the online version which was being linked to from many web discussions, we did it for them: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/News/Better_than_the_Daily_Express.pdf.
The corrected version has been viewed thousands of times now, and if you can link to it from further blogs and websites that would be great.